A combination of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies will seek to chart the course of development in the way people judge the issues of moral dilemmas (by the Defining Issues Test), and to further explicate the nature of this developmental process by examining the relationships between cognitive comprehension of social-moral concepts, their recognition in moral dilemmas, their production (by Kohlberg's moral judgment test), and their role in taking a value stance on controversial public policy issues. Life experiences associated with developmental changes will be studied. We also aim to develop a more practical and valid instrument of moral judgment development by experimenting with new items and formats, using an extension of Coombs' unfolding theory for scaling preference data to devise an overall index, and exploring new groupings of developmental characteristics in reformulations of stages and sub-stages.